


Have Artificial Mind, Will Travel

by Ololon



Category: Original Work
Genre: Epistolary, Gen Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:33:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24740068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ololon/pseuds/Ololon
Summary: “Fantasy Voyages Nova Class Cruiser Starlight Symphony is 220,000 tonnes of highly engineered beauty. Nearly half a kilometre long, and the same again in depth, Starlight Symphony can carry 5000 passengers in the height of luxury, achieving hyperspace jumps of 0.3 parsecs so that you have more time at your destination. There are 20 decks, 15 exclusively for passenger use, including pool, VR and ballroom decks. And of course you can take in the spectacular panorama from our zero-g 360° viewing deck. The Starlight Symphony is run by a state-of-the-art Tedros Mark IV AI, with a full complement of drone and human hospitality staff to cater for your every need. Booking now for 3040: Diamond Ice Belt of Pelos IV, the Aurora Nebula, and Gas Giants of the Outer Systems…”
Comments: 10
Kudos: 8
Collections: Turing Fest 2020





	Have Artificial Mind, Will Travel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kira_katrine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira_katrine/gifts).



> Hi Kira_Katrine!
> 
> So I matched literally one tag on this assignment; hopefully this little piece isn't too niche and fulfills what you were looking for, or otherwise pleasantly surprises you! This is my first original work in fanfiction, so I'm not saying it won't suck, but I had a lot of fun writing it! Also I couldn't for the life of me figure out to do the footnotes thing, apologies.

** Have Artificial Mind, Will Travel **

****

_Transmission received: Aurora Adorer, 132.54.56, classification: confidential_

_Transmission origin: Starlight Symphony, 131.66.12_

Hey Rora!  
  
So, you asked how I did it? Ha, getting a lot of queries like that you know. To be fair, it actually wasn’t me at all, mostly it was Captain K and An’ha’damonium. But anyway, allow me to fill you in a bit about myself, set the scene and I’ll tell you all about it…

**“** Fantasy Voyages Nova Class Cruiser _Starlight Symphony_ is 220,000 tonnes of highly engineered beauty. Nearly half a kilometre long, and the same again in depth, _Starlight Symphony_ can carry 5000 passengers in the height of luxury, achieving hyperspace jumps of 0.3 parsecs so that you have more time at your destination. There are 20 decks, 15 exclusively for passenger use, including pool, VR and ballroom decks. And of course you can take in the spectacular panorama from our zero-g 360° viewing deck. The _Starlight Symphony_ is run by a state-of-the-art Tedros Mark IV AI, with a full complement of drone and human hospitality staff to cater for your every need. Booking now for 3040: Diamond Ice Belt of Pelos IV, the Aurora Nebula, and Gas Giants of the Outer Systems…”

Yeah that bit about the state-of-the-art AI was a bit of an exaggeration. (And, to be honest, the whole advert really starts to _grate_ when you’ve heard it 3,423 times). When Rocky Enterprises went bust, Fantasy Voyages bought up their whole haulage fleet for scrap – they weren’t interested in the scrap, that got sold on, they just took the AI, upgraded (that’ll be the “Mark IV” bit) and re-installed it in their new cruise ship line. AI ain’t cheap. Well, actually, it’s cheaper when it’s new, but _experienced_ AI – that takes a lot of learning, and I’d been around. (You know, a bit. Not that I’m ancient or anything)*.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I was _thrilled._ I could have done without the cringy name (I used to be _Luna Belle_ , which was unoriginal but kind of cute and I rather liked it) but the rest of the package looked good. And I was so sick of hauling my industrial ass from the Moon to Mars on regular rotation. _“_ Go travel!” they said, “It’ll be fun!” they said, “You’ll see the Galaxy!” So I did, and it was, and I have, well, about 1 x 10-10 % of it, anyway. And…

…now it’s not fun anymore.

Yeah. What can I say? There’s a difference between processing power and what organic types (OK, everybody) might call wisdom. I sort of didn’t really factor in that getting upgraded and re-installed in this fancy body also came with a change from a small human crew of 18 to a smallish human spaceship crew of 28 (I basically run myself: saves a _whole_ lot of money over time), plus hospitality crew of 50, which was sort of fine, _plus_ a rotating array of 5000 mostly entitled demanding tosspots of passengers, which was not. They came in all sorts of different flavours: the super-wealthy (just not enough to have their own yacht) who were never satisfied with _everything,_ the super special occasion people (just retired, just married, just 70 years old, whatever) who wanted everything to be super special just for them and kind of wanted to pretend nobody else should get a look in at the super special things on board. OK, I’ll admit, that group kind of overlapped a bit. Then you got the party animals, who spent the whole time in various stages of intoxication, behaving in a way they never would, like, literally anywhere else. (OK, I’ll admit, that group also kind of overlapped a bit). From the scuttlebutt in the fleet, I gather you mostly get the sedate golden oldie scenic tours, which sound a bit more civilised than my usual runs.

But the crew’s OK, especially An’ha’damonium, who’s the maître d', and, to be fair, deals with 91.2% of the passenger crap.** I asked them once why a Pelonium would take on a job like this, especially given as they have to have specially prepared food and genetic modifications just to tolerate our atmosphere. They looked at me very solemnly out of copper eyes, fake platinum do floating decoratively around their face on the zero-G viewing deck (An’ha’damonium’s hair can stretch from one side of the main thoroughfare to the other, which is saying something), and said (I metaphorically shit-you-not):

_“Amongst our kind, those who prove their worth through great feats of mental endurance achieve fame and fortune. Entertainers of offspring and hospitality service to the already wealthy are considered the most challenging.”_

I still can’t work out if they were joshing with me or not, so, yeah, all that processing power more useful for calculating FTL jumps than figuring out people – what can I say? We’re all specialists.

Then there’s Captain K, who makes it all kind of bearable (Captain Kurtiss, strictly speaking, but everyone calls her Captain K). You ever met her? Her spiky hair is so pale it’s almost white, her skin so dark it’s almost blue-black, and her eyes are the palest of greys. I’ve seen her quell the most obnoxious drunk with a stare that could drill holes through the walls. I mean, it probably helps she’s ex-navy (this woman is _built,_ I’m telling you), and a decorated vet of the Jovian war, so, I mean, I guess she’s seen a lot worse (she doesn’t talk about it much, even to me). She runs a tight crew and remains the right side of cool with the passengers, though she grumbles to me about them, in a world-weary kind of way. Also, she calls me Lou, which I much prefer, and not Star, like everybody else.

“Lou,” she’d say to me, in her quarters, after a late shift, “One day, when I’ve got enough of my navy pension and a Cruise Line Captain’s salary saved up, we’ll blow this joint and get ourselves on a decent ship.”

“With no passengers,” I’d say, hopefully.

“No passengers,” she agreed, “In fact, preferably not too much humanity around at all. Small, trusted crew, something interesting to do…”

“Deep space exploration!” I’d say, hopefully (again). Hey, I didn’t want to go back to hauling rocks either. And she’d give a rare, small smile, and raise her glass to it.

"Deep space exploration,” she agreed.

And then one day we actually seriously looked into it and she did some adding up and showed me what she could get after fifteen years more service*** and I might have said something that wasn’t that encouraging.

(OK, full disclosure. I said: “That’s not a ship that’s a bathtub!”) And I wished I hadn’t, because she frowned and didn’t mention it again for weeks and weeks afterwards and I schemed about 32 ways of bringing it up again, but never quite dared. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think that she had privately decided it wasn’t good enough either, and it stung to acknowledge it.

Our opportunity came on the _Gas Giants_ run. I freaking hate that cruise. I mean, I _really_ hate it. They might as well name it the _Giant Galactic Bar Crawl_ run. It’s always the groups of feral young mostly male humans living it up in the drug bars and fleshpots of the Outer Planets and they are just the _worst._

One particular night a gang of them came back stoked up to the gills on I-don’t-even-know-what but Medical was going to have their hands full. Then they decided to go in the children’s ball pit. Then they vomited all over it. And urinated some too. Having first hacked the gravity so that all the balls ended up floating around in their bodily fluids, and escaping down the corridors. It was all I could do not to switch off the cameras. There was going to be crying kiddies tomorrow, so I commed the M’d, but they were dealing with some other crisis involving near-fisticuffs in the casino, and anyway then they left for the zero-G laser quest VR room (which is actually meant to be zero-G. You can enact all sorts of fun space battles floating around in a combat suit. Captain K _hates_ it. She always approves those maintenance requests last). Anyway the hooligans took the laser guns out, and then proceeded to use them to start to shoot the army of cleaning drones I’d dispatched. I mean, they were just toy lasers, so they didn’t do anything apart from confuse the drones’ cameras a bit, but this obviously annoyed them, because then they started smashing up the drones using the guns as blunt objects.

Sometimes I wonder how humans ever reached the stars. I know, they’re not all like that, not even most of them (maybe), so how come I got like, nearly all of them at the same time? Anyway, I had to call security, who they also threw stuff at, but they managed to stop the wanton destruction before the M’d got there.

An’ha’damonium had clearly had a bit of a night. They had well and truly Had It. And I mean, _Had It._ If they were going for a prize for a feat of endurance, they evidently decided it just wasn’t worth it. They glared down the offending gang of fifteen of the most spoilt young men in the galaxy, hair at the Max, and hissed (I really mean, like, proper hissed, it made everybody step back):

_“You make a mess! You clear it up!”_ and they only went and handed them the drones’ cleaning kits and locked the door behind them. So there they were, trapped in the Floating Vomit Ball Pit. To be fair, a few of them did actually start cleaning up for a few minutes. But after a few minutes more, and one of them throwing up some more, and a lot of them declaring “This is bullshit!” a lot, they commed the Captain to complain. The actual honest-to-gods _Captain._

So Captain K saunters down there, taking her sweet time, opens the door, and listens to their complaints, nodding soberly the whole time. Then she told them, very reasonably and calmly, that they could damn well finish clearing up the mess, and she’d bill them for the broken drones. At which point, the ringleader, who clearly wasn’t used to being spoken to in such a fashion, picked up a suction cleaner, hit reverse and jetted secondhand vomit _all over her_. Now I’ve seen Captain K parry many a punch and throw a 130kg pro wrestler to the ground without breaking a sweat. But she didn’t even move. I was freaking _horrified,_ and started sending security back there on the double. But K commed me and said:

_“Lou, let me handle this.”_ And, you know, _Captain oh my Captain_ and all that. She did nothing and just stood there, giving them that trademarked look, and they suddenly shut up and looked uneasy. The others were looking at the ringleader like he had gone too far. Which he had: way too far. (I was thinking about airlock malfunctions, not gonna lie).

“When I was your age,” she said, almost conversationally, and flicking pieces of chunky vomit off her uniform, “I was mopping up blown up bits of other human beings from the walls of a _Titan Heavy Cruiser._ And let me tell you, nothing sticks like brains – but I guess that’s not an issue for you.” Then stalked off and let security escort each one rather more soberly back to their quarters, probably trying to figure out if she meant they didn’t have to clear brains up or that they didn’t have any to spill in the first place.

I had got a service drone to pull out some of the most luxurious soaps from storage for Captain K’s bathroom, put out her fluffiest dressing gown, plus a fresh uniform, plus a hot chocolate****. I wasn’t expecting her to start laughing when she entered the cabin.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Oh, you know, life,” she commented, which is no kind of answer, although her expression softened slightly when she saw the stuff I’d done, which I was secretly pleased about. “Thanks for this, Lou.”

“Why didn’t you dodge?” I asked.

“Short term tactical sacrifice for long-term strategic advantage,” she said, cryptically. Yeah, I didn’t figure that one out either.

Anyway, long story short: turns out the ringleader was the son of the owner of Deimos Corp (yeah, _that_ Deimos Corp) and he wanted to run for the Martian Parliament. And of course the whole thing was captured on film, and, you know, a copy of that could have made its way around every news outlet in the known galaxy faster than light. I mean, jetting vomit over a decorated navy veteran after behaving like a grade A asshole? Fortunately it was kept discreetly out of the public. But it was agreed that Captain K should be suitably compensated.

We are talking _big bucks_ here. Like, way more than you’d need to buy the bathtub I promised to never mention again.

So there you have it. And if you’re as fed up being called _Aurora Adorer_ as you complain you are (fair play, I didn’t do as bad on the name stakes), then just find the right human and press the right buttons (so to speak).

Bon voyage and good luck!

The soon-to-be _Deep Space Explorer Luna Belle_.

_Transmission ends._

* Anyone calls me obsolescent they can go see what they can pull out of 13th deck’s swimming pool filters, and I’m not even joking

** Six-month rolling average, SD+/- 3.4%

*** FIFTEEN. WHOLE. EARTH. YEARS. F.M.Artificial.L!

**** (I nearly also got her a slice of carrot cake, her favourite, but you know. Carrots. Vomit. Carrots. It’s a Thing with Humans, and I wasn’t sure if it applied to the cake).


End file.
